What is Family Constellations Therapy? Healing the Hidden Patterns in Our Families

Have you ever found yourself stuck in a cycle you can’t explain—repeating the same relationship difficulties, emotional struggles, or even health challenges as people in your family? Many of us live with burdens that don’t fully belong to us. They’re carried unconsciously from parents, grandparents, or generations further back.

Family Constellations therapy is a unique approach that helps bring these invisible patterns to light, offering insight and healing in surprising ways.

The Origins of Family Constellations

Family Constellations was developed by German psychotherapist Bert Hellinger in the late 1980s. Hellinger observed that unresolved trauma, grief, or injustices within a family system often reverberate down the generations.

At its core, Family Constellations is a systemic therapy. It doesn’t look at the individual in isolation, but as part of a much larger web—the family system. The premise is simple yet profound: when someone in a family has been excluded, forgotten, or carried a trauma that was never acknowledged, the effects may resurface later in the lives of their descendants.

How a Constellation Works

Constellations can be done in a group or one-to-one setting. In a group, the person bringing the issue (sometimes called the “issue holder”) briefly describes what they want to explore—perhaps ongoing anxiety, difficulties with intimacy, or recurring anger.

Other participants are then chosen to represent members of their family system. Once placed in the space, these representatives often begin to feel and express emotions that reflect the real family member’s experience, even without prior knowledge. In a one-to-one session, objects or markers can be used instead of people.

The facilitator gently guides the process, helping unconscious loyalties or hidden entanglements come into view. With insight, compassion, and often the use of carefully chosen healing sentences, space is created for resolution and peace.

What Can Family Constellations Help With?

Family Constellations doesn’t aim to “fix” problems in the traditional sense—it reveals what lies beneath. Clients often find clarity or emotional relief in situations such as:

• Emotional struggles: depression, anxiety, rage, grief.
• Relationship issues: repeated conflicts, estrangement, or difficulty maintaining closeness.
• Health challenges: chronic illness, menstrual disorders, or fatigue (as part of a holistic care plan).
• A sense of being “stuck”: carrying a heaviness or limitation without knowing why.

Why It Feels Different to Other Therapies

What makes Family Constellations unique is its focus on the system rather than the individual. Instead of asking “What’s wrong with me?”, the question becomes, “What am I carrying for my family?”

Hellinger described this as “unconscious loyalty.” Out of love and belonging, a child may take on the burdens of an earlier family member—whether that’s their sorrow, their anger, or even their fate. In a constellation, these loyalties are revealed, honoured, and released.

Many clients are surprised at how quickly deep insights arise—issues that might take years of talking therapy can become visible in a single constellation.

From Family Constellations to Rapid Core Healing

While Family Constellations shines a light on systemic and ancestral patterns, many people also carry deeply personal traumas that shape their daily lives—events like childhood neglect, bullying, abusive relationships, or sudden loss. These experiences may not originate in the family system, but they leave imprints in the nervous system that continue to drive present-day reactions.

This is where Rapid Core Healing (RCH) comes in. Developed as a natural extension of Family Constellations, RCH combines systemic insights with cutting-edge trauma-processing techniques. Where Family Constellations reveals the hidden family story, Rapid Core Healing allows an individual to work directly with their own life story—addressing trauma, grief, and emotional pain stored in the body and unconscious mind.

How Rapid Core Healing Works

• It identifies the root of a painful reaction (for example, panic attacks, low self-worth, or overwhelming PMDD rage).
• Through a guided process, the client reconnects with the younger or traumatised part of themselves and provides the resolution, protection, or compassion that was missing at the time.
• The nervous system experiences safety and completion, allowing the trauma imprint to dissolve.

Why This Matters

For many clients, combining Family Constellations and Rapid Core Healing creates a complete healing pathway:

• Constellations address inherited and systemic burdens.
• RCH addresses personal trauma imprints, but also addresses imbalances in the family system that led to these traumas.

Together, they allow someone to step out of repeating cycles—whether those cycles come from generations past or from their own lived experience.

I use Family Constellations and Rapid Core Healing very successfully for PMDD support a www.pmddnaturopath.com 

What to Expect in a Session

Family Constellations and Rapid Core Healing sessions are guided gently and safely by a trained facilitator. You don’t need to relive every detail of your past—in fact, often very little needs to be said for the process to unfold.

Clients often describe the experience as surprising, profound, and relieving. The sense of weight lifting, clarity returning, or peace settling in can be immediate, with ripple effects that continue for weeks or months.

Healing the Invisible Threads

Both Family Constellations and Rapid Core Healing are rooted in compassion, not blame. They invite us to see that many of the struggles we carry are not personal flaws, but parts of larger patterns—whether inherited or rooted in past trauma.

By acknowledging these hidden dynamics and offering the missing resolution, clients often find freedom, emotional stability, and a renewed sense of connection to themselves and their families.

As Bert Hellinger wrote, “When we honour the past, we find peace in the present.” These therapies give us a way to do just that—healing the invisible threads that bind us, and opening the door to a more balanced and fulfilling life.

Photo by SHVETS production